


Inverse Corollary

by gallifreyburning



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Creepy Fluff, F/M, Multi, References to Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-01-31 07:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21442456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: Taken prisoner during a CIA mission, Leela and Narvin must work together to escape.
Relationships: Leela (Doctor Who)/Narvin (Doctor Who), Leela/Narvin/Romana II, Narvin (Doctor Who)/Suffering (Inevitable)
Comments: 19
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

The first time their captors take Leela from the prison cell, Narvin doesn’t let himself panic. They’re a rather large species, with iridescent orange hair covering most of their muscular bodies, and they have weapons, so he doesn’t imagine that fighting will do much good. One guard has an energy blaster, the second a plasma prod. When the latter moves toward Leela, Narvin instinctively steps in front of her.

“Take me instead,” he blurts out, surprising himself.

Their captors don’t reject this offer; Leela does. She jostles him away, manhandling him back into the corner. “They will take neither of us. Not before I scrape out their eyeballs with my fingernails and pop them like grapes!”

“Stay,” one guard barks at Narvin, blaster trained between his eyes, the safety most definitely disarmed. The power pack hums with the distinctive electric charge, waiting for the twitch of a trigger finger. Simultaneously, the other guard lunges forward, jamming the plasma prod into Leela’s stomach. She doesn’t even have the chance to cry out, her entire body going rigid in a bright flash. He’s on his feet, half-blind and reaching for her, worried she’ll hit her head on the stone floor when she collapses.

His hands find nothing; he stumbles forward too many steps, sure that she must be nearby, and slams face-first into the metal bars of the cage.

“Good dog,” the guard with the blaster says to him. Narvin’s vision clears as the cell door slams shut. Leela is slung over the shoulder of the guard with the prod, limp and helpless as they carry her away.

“Stop! Let’s be reasonable, we can talk! What do you want? Why are we here? Are you after information, or weapons? I have both! She doesn’t know anything, you’ve got the wrong person!” The guards pay him no mind. He doesn’t notice the blood dripping from his nose, from where he hit the bars, until after they turn the corner out of sight.

They’ve been prisoner here for one solar cycle, left to wait in this cell without food or water or sign of their captors, until now. Of course, Narvin has already scoured the space from top to bottom, looking for security weaknesses to exploit, and found nothing. Regardless, now that Leela is gone, he sets about scouring it again with fresh desperation, and to keep himself busy. He can’t just sit and wait, without knowing what they’re doing to her somewhere else in this dank facility.

Half a span later, as he balances precariously on a stool atop the sleeping cot and prods the ceiling for any nooks and crannies he missed earlier, he hears Leela’s first scream. Muffled by at least a few walls, but angry and feral. There is a cadence to it, as if perhaps words might be involved, but the detail is lost to the distance between.

Narvin didn’t realize how luxurious the silence was, until she broke it.

He stands frozen, fingertips pressed into the ceiling overhead, and stares at the dim corridor beyond the cell bars. His skin feels like it’s vibrating with the raw sound, like a tuning fork hit too hard; something ugly wells in his gut, outrage and fear churning into bile.

A short silence, then another scream. The second one animates him again, as if a spell is broken, and he flings himself off the stool and toward the cell door, cramming his face between the bars as he tries to glimpse further down the corridor. It’s useless, so he cocks his head and listens instead.

_Two walls between us_, he thinks. At least, given the speed of sound and Leela’s maximum vocal range – something he’s intimately familiar with, given how many hours he’s spent arguing with her, and how often one or both of them ends up shouting. Leela would be able to tell for sure, with her superior hearing. Another silence, and then a third scream at an entirely different pitch – no anger this time, just agony, the cry of a dying animal.

“Leela!” The name leaves his lips and ricochets down the hard surfaces of the corridor until it’s out of earshot, as lost to him as the human herself. _“Leela!”_

After a terrifyingly long silence, she replies in a horrific wail that doesn’t sound anything like his name at all.

Narvin keeps track of time without meaning to, the hours broken by periodic bouts of tortured screaming. When they eventually bring Leela back to the cell, the most Time-Lord-y bit of his Time Lord brain cheerfully informs him that she’s been gone six spans and eighteen microspans. It tacks on some nanospans to boot, but he doesn’t listen, because the guards throw her limp body at him and slam the door simultaneously, so he doesn’t have a chance to think about fighting the guards or breaking for freedom, much less act on it.

It’s a miracle he manages to catch Leela before she hits the floor. She’s heavy, much heavier than he expects, and he staggers in a circle to maneuver her onto the single cot.

“Leela?”

Her eyes are closed, her breathing shallow but steady. He places his fingers on her wrist to take her pulse, but then realizes he doesn’t know what a human’s single heartbeat should feel like, and ends up holding her hand instead. A light bead of sweat dampens the hair at her brow, but otherwise she looks normal. Certainly cleaner than she did when she was taken from him – from the cell. The two of them had really made a go of it before being captured, scrambling through a few ventilation shafts that hadn’t been cleaned in eons. There was dust and sneezing, the thing that gave them away in the end. She’s still wearing her CIA field uniform, and it looks pristine.

“Oh, Leela. I’m so sorry,” he mumbles. Maybe he’s apologizing for the proper row they had before leaving Gallifrey, over whether her new role in the Agency meant she was required to wear the uniform in the first place. Maybe it’s for ignoring her instincts and insisting they trust the grubby little informant who sold them out, when they arrived on Lovidian Station Four. Maybe it’s because he should have somehow been louder and faster when they came to take her from the cell. Maybe it’s because she’s unconscious, but he still has to check her for wounds.

He pulls back both eyelids and her irises contract, as they should, but otherwise she doesn’t react. Cradling her head, he slips his fingers into her hair and feels carefully along her scalp; no obvious evidence of head trauma. He squeezes her shoulders, lifts and examines her arms, pulls her sleeves up as far as they will go to inspect for welts or bruises, and finds nothing. She’s clean – remarkably so – and in spite of six hours’ worth of what sounded like horrible torture, bears no visible sign of injury.

The only thing amiss is that she’s barefoot. He doesn’t notice until the end of his inspection, and the sight of her surprisingly delicate, immaculately clean feet brings him up short. Standing up straight, he stares at the pink skin, and elegant arches, and half-moon nails. He’s never seen her barefoot before – come to think of it, he’s rarely seen anyone else barefoot at all, because no one walks around like that on Gallifrey, and no respectable Time Lord would be caught dead in sandals. Without socks and shoes, Leela looks fragile, and vulnerable, and he wonders who was responsible for removing her boots and whether he might have a chance to repay them with a staser blast, or even a punch to the nose, before this is all over.

For the first time she stirs, her head moving and lips twitching.

“Leela?” He sinks to his knees beside her, resting a hand on her forehead. Beneath her closed eyelids, her eyes move as if she’s dreaming. Her lips move again, and perhaps he’s imagining it, but they almost form the word _Romana_.

A lump has been slowly gathering in Narvin’s throat, thick and sour with emotions he isn’t quite sure how to name. He trails his hand down her cheek. “I’m here to look after you. I won’t go anywhere, I promise.”

She doesn’t reply, but her lips move again. With a measured exhale, he sits on the floor to face the cell bars, firmly planting himself between Leela and anyone who might try to take her again. The floor is hard and cold, and after a while his ass goes numb. He’s drifting toward sleep when the next visitor arrives, which is why he doesn’t react as quickly as he should: he might be dreaming.

“Narvin!”

The blessedly familiar voice floods him with relief. He turns to Leela, but she’s still very much comatose on the cot. She couldn’t have been the one to speak, even though he would swear on the Rod of Rassilon it was her.

In confusion, he peers at the dim corridor. Outside, just discernable in the gloom, Leela stands beyond the bars. She has a sharp tool in one hand and is already working at the lock mechanism on the door, as if to pick it open.

“I have come to rescue you,” Leela in the corridor whispers, her tool clicking against metal.

“What? How?” He looks back to the comatose Leela behind him, and then to the exact same woman standing outside. Scrambling to his feet, he instinctively extends a protective hand over the cot, as if to shield one Leela from the other. The two humans look identical, including their clothes. The only difference is that one is stone cold unconscious.

“I fooled the guards into thinking I was injured, and then stabbed them with this tool,” corridor Leela replies, still focusing on the door. “I am sorry I did not come sooner. I was worried they might have taken you for the torture, as well.” She makes a noise of delight as the lock snaps, and then she yanks the cell door open. “Come on, there are screens and computers down the corridor, past the guard patrols. You shall use them to find the hangar bay or escape pods, so we can get away from this horrible place.”

Narvin doesn’t move, and corridor Leela finally looks at him properly, and then the rest of the cell. Her eyes land on the comatose Leela on the cot and she draws a sharp breath of alarm.

“What in the name of Xoanon is _that_?”


	2. Chapter 2

“I’m not sure that’s the right question,” Narvin replies, studying this other Leela from head to foot, now that the cell door is out of the way. Pristine uniform, sweat glistening on her brow, bare feet, she’s identical in every detail to the woman on the cot.

Corridor Leela glances into the gloomy hallway in alarm, and places a finger to her lips. “The guard patrol is coming again. They reappear at the same interval it takes to call the High Council to order.”

High Council meeting invocations are a tedious pronouncement about the wisdom of Rassilon and the responsibility of safeguarding Eternity, the usual sort of Time Lord blather. In full, it lasts around twelve microspans – which means twelve microspans between guard patrols, if this Leela is to be trusted. Watching her closely, Narvin asks, “When Valyes recites the call to order, or when Romana does?”

“Valyes, obviously,” she retorts. “He speaks with the speed of a tortoise swimming in tar.” And with that, she steps into the cell and swings the door mostly closed, careful not to let it lock again. “Now hush, so they do not come to look in on us.”

This Leela is right: Valyes is especially tiresome at calling the High Council to order, absorbed in the sound of his own voice, stretching every word across his ample ego. The tool in her hand is dirty, but in this light he can’t tell whether it’s covered in alien blood, which would corroborate her story about escape, or if it’s just machine grease.

Behind him, Leela on the cot stirs again. A noise escapes her lips, something vaguely like “n-n-nnn-n," and then she settles back into unconsciousness. Narvin stares down at her, then the upright woman in front of him. There are a finite number of possibilities to explain what’s going on, the first and most likely being that he’s in the midst of an hallucination. His captors have pumped psychotomimetic gas into the cell and his brain is working double-time, producing double Leelas, to deal with it. Closing his eyes, he draws in a breath and grows very, very still, listening to his own heartsbeats and the rhythms of his body, doing a quick inventory. Everything is running properly, no sign of foreign chemicals in his blood.

Maybe he's hallucinating his own healthy biology, too.

"Now is not the time for a nap, foolish Time Lord," upright Leela snaps. "What are you doing like that, with your eyes closed?"

"Concentrating," Narvin replies. "Now kindly shut up for a moment." One thing he trusts, regardless of any other factor, is his time sense, and he can tell for certain that these two women aren’t anomalous. They’re not the same Leela from different points in her history. They are distinct, discrete. Does Leela have a secret twin she’s never spoken of before? Could there be parallel universes at play, doppelgangers stepping from one reality to another? Is one of them a speed-grown clone? The Leela on the cot is indisputably living, and not an android, but he can’t be sure about the one standing in front of him. He hasn’t felt her skin or taken her pulse.

"I will not shut up, not until you see sense: that we are in danger and need to leave right now." The conscious Leela certainly sounds rude enough to be the real article. She steps closer, peering around him at her twin. “Who is she?”

“I’m not sure. Then again, I’m not sure who you are, either. It’s rather a dilemma.”

“_I_ am Leela!” she hisses, keeping her voice low to avoid attracting attention from outside the cell. “I do not know who that is, but she is a – a fake, a pretend!”

“You said you killed the aliens who took you,” he says. She gives a curt nod. “There isn’t any blood on your uniform, your cuffs are spotless. How do you kill an eight-foot orange alien without a smudge or broken fingernail?”

She frowns, glancing at the grimy tool in her manicured hand. “You have known me for so many years, and still do not believe I can make a clean kill?”

This isn’t an unreasonable response; if anyone could commit homicide without putting a hair out of place, it’s the human in front of him. “And what happened to your boots?”

She wiggles her toes against the floor. “The hairy creatures took them off, when they began the torture. They attached sticky wires to my heels and my forehead. It was … unpleasant.” Her attention flickers to the unconscious Leela. “Her boots are gone, too. Has she also been put to the torture? Is that why she is unconscious? She must be very weak.”

“I don’t know.” Narvin crosses his arms. “What am I supposed to do, here?”

“We are _supposed_ to be escaping,” she retorts, gesturing the makeshift weapon in irritation. He leans away, as much as he can in the small space. “Whatever that thing is, we must leave her. She will slow us down.”

“Let me hold that for now,” he says, extending a hand, his eyes still locked to the weapon. She purses her lips and drops it in his palm with a huff. Whoever, or whatever, she is, she at least is acting as if she trusts him. “If you’re right about the patrols, we have seven microspans until they return to this corridor. That isn't enough time to make a run for it, either way. We should wait until the next round. It will let us … work this out.”

“They might find the dead guards I left behind before that. Anyway, what do you mean, work what out?” In a quick movement she squats beside the cot and reaches out to touch the other woman. On instinct, Narvin moves to protect her, catching Leela’s wrist to prevent contact. The conscious Leela does a complicated maneuver with her hand that instantly twists Narvin’s arm painfully, his wrist in her grip instead. He goes onto his tiptoes, his entire body leaning sideways to alleviate the pressure. 

“Hey! Ouch!” he growls indignantly, glaring at her. Her fingers are warm, her skin feels exactly like the other Leela’s. At least this answers the question of whether she's an android.

She releases him with an irritated grunt. “I would not hurt her, I only wanted to look. Would you not want to examine a false copy of yourself?”

“Why are you certain she’s the copy?”

“Because I know what is real, and I am myself. We cannot both be the same person,” she says with crossed arms, as if these words make some sort of logical sense. “This conversation is pointless and we are wasting too much time. The guard will pass again in a moment, and we should leave this cell and get to the computer, so you can find us a way out of this place.”

His mind racing with no finish line in sight, Narvin frowns. “I won’t leave her.”

“And I will not leave you, Narvin.” Leela rolls her eyes. “Fine. Carry her if you insist, but we must move quickly. Can you do that?”

"I will," he replies, not entirely sure if he's capable of meeting her demands but determined nonetheless. He needs time and maybe some chrono-analysis equipment to unravel this knotted situation, and he won't find either of those things while he's stuck in this cell.

As if on cue, a klaxon sounds in the distance. Leela's face turns even more grim. “See? They have discovered the dead guards. We are going _now!_”

Her glare is as sharp as a whip, and he finds himself moving without having made a conscious decision to do so. He takes the unconscious Leela by one arm and heaves her up to sit, then slings her over his right shoulder. She’s limp and unwieldy, but not unmanageable, he decides.

While he’s finding his equilibrium, the other Leela snatches the tool from his hand and hops out of the cell. With an emphatic gesture for him to follow, she sets off down the dim corridor.

_This is the most logical course of action_, Narvin tells himself as he lumbers through the door carrying one human and trailing another. _Get all the Leelas to safety first, sort them out later._

Conscious Leela leads the way, occasionally signaling him to stop as she examines corners and open doors, ensuring the coast is clear. Distant grunting shouts and footsteps drift through the corridors from various directions, sometimes close enough to send cold prickles down Narvin’s spine.

On his shoulder, Leela heaves a sharp breath and slurs, “Narvin?”

At the same moment, the other Leela begins to jog ahead. He tries to quicken his pace, but the extra weight he’s carrying makes it difficult to keep up. Her jog turns into a loping run, her shoulders dangerously taut. The prickles in his spine solidify into an icicle, its pointy tip jabbing panic into the base of his skull.

“Leela! Slow down!” he hisses, because at this pace she'll be off the space station before he can shuffle another hundred meters.

A group of three orange guards round the corner at the next intersection, directly in front of Leela. Her speed was obviously in anticipation of this development, because she’d heard or sensed them somehow. With an abjectly terrifying predatory grace, she takes two more strides and dodges sideways, stabbing one orange creature in the jugular as she leaps up. Her momentum carries her into the wall, foot making solid contact as she springs even higher, ricocheting into the second guard. One arm hooks around its neck and she slashes its throat, the two of them tumbling into the third alien, all of them sprawling to the floor in a jumble.

There’s a panicked squawk and a quiet, ferocious scream as she tussles with the last guard on the floor; blood rapidly pools beneath them, limbs slick and flailing on the metal floor. Before Narvin can even consider whether to put down the unconscious Leela and help, the three creatures are dead or dying, gurgling final syllables through crushed and cut windpipes.

Leela wipes her tool clean on one of their furry legs, then stands straight and points at an alcove ahead. “The computer is here,” she says, as if she hasn’t just put on the most breathtakingly violent display he’s seen in all his lives. The Leela over his shoulder feels infinitely heavy, a dead weight compared to the blood-soaked woman in front of him. The green pool on the floor continues to expand, seeping up to the tips of his boots.

“Narvin, move!” she snaps, and he forces air into his lungs as he steps into the puddle. Careful not to slip, trying to keep Leela balanced on his shoulder, he plods around the mess and joins her at the alcove.

"Fetch me one of their blasters, would you?" he asks, activating the terminal with his one free hand. She nods and disappears. He squints at the foreign script on the screen, narrowing his concentration, because there isn't a TARDIS anywhere nearby to assist with translation. The computer system is simple enough to sort out, even as he clutches the unconscious Leela's legs securely to his chest. He finds a map of the station, and the nearest hangar bay.

Slung across his shoulder, Leela stirs a fraction, and for a second time she slurs, “Narvin?”

He shifts his shoulder, leaning sideways to ease some pressure for both of them, and tightens his grip on her thighs. It is a cruel bit of irony, to be a Time Lord without enough time to deal with this sort of thing properly.

The other Leela reappears and hands over a green blood-smeared blaster. As he situates it in his empty hand, he tells her, “Three more junctures, take a right, up two floors, five junctures and then a left to the emergency evacuation area."

With a glance at the twitching woman in his arms, she sets off again in the direction he indicated. Narvin trundles along behind, his shoulder spasming under its burden, cramps radiating down his arm. He spends a fraction of energy increasing the flow through his left heart, sending extra blood to those suffocating vessels.

“Not far now,” he whispers aloud, not sure whether he’s speaking to himself or the Leela he's holding.

As they emerge from the service ladder chute two floors up, Narvin puffing with the effort of climbing with a spare body, another guard patrol ambushes them. Leela emerges first, surprising the two creatures almost as much as they surprise her. Below, on the last few ladder rungs, Narvin hears the ricochet of a blaster shot and wishes he had a third hand, so he could pull his own stolen blaster from his belt before he climbs out of the hole. 

He emerges to find that Leela has disarmed the guards, but one has cut her with a bladed weapon, slicing the back of her leg deeply enough to draw a spray of crimson blood, along with a feral scream of fury. Narvin gropes at his belt for the blaster and fumbles it to the floor; he has to drop the other Leela to fetch it again. She shudders, eyelids fluttering, and reaches weakly for his hand. The bleeding, furious Leela sinks her teeth into one orange guard's arm and stabs it with the tool in her opposite hand, trying to free herself from its clutches.

“Almost done,” he gasps at the unconscious Leela, still not sure who he’s trying to reassure. The sight of any Leela suffering is unbearable, especially now that he isn't trapped in a cell listening to her being tortured - now he can fix it, stop it, _save her_. His fingers slide around the pistol grip of the blaster with practiced ease, and he doesn't bother to check whether the beam is at a fatal level before popping off two head shots in as many seconds.

Pinned beneath a suddenly dead alien, Leela groans.

“I can’t carry both of you,” Narvin says, seizing the dead creature by the scruff of its neck and hauling it away. An alarmingly large amount of red human blood covers her lower body and the floor, smeared across silver metal like a lithium nebula. “The hangar is just there. Can you walk?”

“I will crawl, if I must,” she snarls through gritted teeth, heaving up onto her one good leg. Narvin keeps the blaster as he retrieves the unconscious Leela – although she still seems to be coming around, wiggling feebly in his grip. The other Leela holds onto the wall, her wounded leg trailing behind as she forces herself forward in stuttering hops. The wound gapes, still pouring blood, with bits of muscle and tendon visible when she moves.

Neither of them waste energy speaking. He moves in front of her with the blaster, taking on the role of scout and protector, even as the unconscious Leela grows more animated on his shoulder. If she'll just stay still another moment, he can get them both onto a ship and stop the other Leela from bleeding out, and then sort this situation properly.

A titanium door stands between them and the hangar bay. Narvin considers prying off the cover of the control mechanism and engineering it open, but the sound of more shouting guards in the distance makes him pull the blaster trigger, instead. It’s a risk – he might smelt the controls into uselessness – but finally something goes right on this awful mission, and the door hisses open to reveal a bay full of spaceships, with one wall sealed off only by an energy shield, a starfield visible beyond its translucent purple glow.

He evaluates the available spacecraft and gestures to one with his blaster, telling Leela, “That one, the Cylethian Skipjack.”

It’s small and maneuverable, with decent engines. Most importantly, Cylethian ships are known for their powerful communication arrays, precisely what they need to send a distress signal to Gallifrey. Leela limps through the door behind him and runs out of wall to lean on; she tries to take a step unsupported and cries out, collapsing to the ground.

The shouting from the corridor grows louder.

One Leela still dangling from his shoulder, he turns and takes the other Leela’s hand, helping her to her feet. “Hold onto me.”

She nods, lips curled in a defiant snarl against the pain, and claps a tight grip onto his other shoulder. Shuffling forward in sync, they reach the Skipjack and Narvin borrows Leela’s sharp tool, dripping with blood and covered in bits of flesh, to jimmy the door. Bundling the semi-conscious Leela inside, he manhandles the crippled one in right after. She crawls toward the cockpit of the small ship, leaving a generous trail of blood in her wake. Before he can follow, a troop of alien guards burst into the hangar, hooting and firing their weapons.

“Get _in_!” Leela barks, frantic.

He has both feet inside and is reaching for the door control when an energy blast hits him square between the shoulder blades. The impact flings him forward, all the way inside the ship and onto his belly, his face slamming into the Skipjack deck plates. The last time he felt this sort of pain, so all-consuming and paralyzing, he was about to regenerate into his second body. His vision goes grey around the edges as the ship door squeals shut, sealing them inside. The other Leela has reached the front of the small vehicle, her blood-smeared visage turned toward him for a split-second before she situates herself in front of the ship controls.

“If you die before we are back on Gallifrey, Narvin, I will never forgive you!” she calls over the _clack-clack_ of activated instrument panels and hum of hyperlight engines flaring to life.

Narvin’s head swims. _When did Leela learn to pilot a spacecraft?_ Still not breathing, longing for the inferno of regeneration to release him from this unbearable torment, his head lolls to one side as he tries to remember how to speak, so he can deliver a sarcastic reply of some kind. His gaze lands on the other Leela, lying parallel only a few feet away – no longer unconscious, her eyes wide and her lips pale as she stares back at him. She's trembling, flailing weakly against the metal decking as she struggles to rise.

The agony in his back begins to recede, making room for a strangely damp sensation.

Blood. He's bleeding, so much that it runs in rivulets between his ribs and soaks his uniform.

The Skipjack shudders, and Narvin's cheek bounces against the floor plates as the ship lifts into the air. Metal squeals outside the hull as they crash through several objects on the way out of the hangar. Narvin blinks, the grey edges of his vision expanding like a thickening fog. With a monumental effort, Leela moves her hand just far enough to touch his cheek. She mouths his name, a tear trailing across the bridge of her nose and dripping onto the deck plate.

He falls into blackness.


	3. Chapter 3

When Narvin opens his eyes, he finds himself staring at a familiar crack in the ceiling. This isn’t the ceiling of a Cylethian Skipjack or a medical station; it’s his bedroom ceiling. At least, it _was_ his bedroom ceiling until Romana unceremoniously demoted him. He hasn’t seen this particular ceiling crack, shaped vaguely like the Rycine Constellation, in a few months, not since Romana roared into the CIA like a whirlwind and blew him right out of the Coordinator’s desk and the Coordinator’s housing unit, all in one go.

The memory of being shot fresh in his mind, he takes a cautious breath. No pain, not even a twinge in his back. In fact, he feels suspiciously comfortable and well-rested. He’s practically swaddled in a blanket, neatly tucked in. Conversely, the rest of the bed is a riot of sheets and pillows, as if a herd of pig-bears has wallowed next to him. Someone else has been in this room, at some point, because Narvin would never sleep in such a sloppy state.

He sits bolt upright at that realization, studying the rest of the room in alarm, but he’s alone. How did he get from the escape pod to this old bedroom – this old bedroom room full of his furniture, identical to when he lived here, but all of it in shameful disarray, a chair overturned in the corner and a few CIA robes scattered on the floor? What the bloody hell is happening?

Twisting one arm back, folding it along his spine, he probes for any sign of injury. The skin is smooth, not even a scar where he was shot. With a huff of relief and confusion, he brings his hands around to scrub at his face, to make sure he’s really awake. This is when he discovers the black silk belt tied round his left wrist. Catching hold of its opposite end to take a closer look, he notices a faint but unmistakable welt on his right wrist as well, matching the mark beneath the scarf on his left.

He was bound last night, and for some length of time. A prisoner again? He and both Leelas made it to the escape pod, but perhaps the injured Leela didn’t manage to pilot them away. Surely he’d still be in a dank, dark cell aboard Lovidian Station Four if he was prisoner, and not in some bizarre version of his old flat.

All of this is illogical, improbable, _impossible_.

Breathing like careful clockwork, he removes the silk belt and wills his hearts to slow down, reaching out with his psychic senses. A bustling hive of activity surrounds him, billions of Time Lord minds humming indistinctly each behind their own mental shields all over the Citadel. Leela would probably say something about her instincts feeling unsettled, at this point, but Narvin is far too practical for such nonsense. This room looks and smells like home, he can sense the presence of other Time Lords, and there’s no real reason to believe he isn’t on Gallifrey.

That’s the question of _where_ sorted, now to sort out _how_.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he stands up and realizes that he’s naked. Heat flares across his bare upper back, sparked by a deep sense of embarrassment – he doesn’t sleep naked, not ever. Its impractical and extravagant. With a wary glance at the closed bedroom door, he seizes a pillow to cover himself as he scuttles to the closet.

Reaching inside without looking, he pulls on the first CIA robe to hand. The fabric splits straight down the back, because the shoulders are far too narrow for his frame, and the bottom hem stops at his calves.

Someone put child-sized CIA robes into his closet? Mentally composing a short list of suspects likely to have engineered such a petty prank – Braxiatel at the top, Ace a close second – he opens the other closet door in search of real robes. This reveals an entire section filled with leather and linen clothes, serapes and trousers and dresses in an unmistakable non-Gallifreyan style.

Half of the closet is bursting with Leela’s wardrobe.

This revelation, with all its implications and possibilities, draws him up short. She’s here, too – how many of them are here? Why are her clothes in his old flat? Why is _he_ in his old flat? He glances at the rumpled bed and then the closed door, and then reaches into the closet and fingers a few leather pieces, the same way he sent out a psychic wave a moment ago, to verify the reality of his surroundings. Those blazing tingles spread from his bare shoulders to his chest, propelled by bafflement and alarm.

Deciding he should scout outside the bedroom as soon as possible, he sifts through the available CIA robes until he finds one that isn’t child-sized and gets dressed. Before leaving, he looks in the bedside table for his staser, the one he kept for years in case of emergency. The drawer holds no weapons, only a few spare data pads and half-used, unlabeled bottles of liquid. He picks one up and clicks the lid open. The viscous substance smells distinctly of lushberries.

He’s been through a tremendous shock, which is probably why it takes a few beats longer than it should to comprehend what he’s holding, and to drop it back into the drawer with a startled _oh_. 

Bracing himself, wishing Leela was here in case he finds something even more unpleasant outside of this bedroom, he whirls around and marches to the door. It clangs open to reveal the rest of the Coordinator’s flat, a large living area adjacent to the small, open kitchen.

The kitchen was only designed to fit one person, for operating the food replicator or perhaps hand-cooking in a pinch. This morning, two people have squeezed into the tiny space. A mug of tea and half-cut loaf of bread stand abandoned on the counter. Narvin’s wish for Leela is granted: she’s here, pinning Romana against the tall cabinets, kissing her passionately. They make soft happy noises, hands roaming in a familiar, leisurely way. Romana is wearing a nightgown and black robe that happens to be missing its belt, the exact same color and material as the belt he found tied around his wrist. Leela’s gossamer slip is so short, even from behind it leaves nothing to the imagination.

This tableau instantly plunges Narvin’s entire being into a void of white noise, his thoughts and senses swaddled in a snowstorm. The sliver of concentration he has left instinctively devotes itself to controlling his physiological response, ensuring that his blood flow doesn’t divert to any problematic areas. This reallocation of resources completely hamstrings his ability to think critically about what he’s been through and how he got here; for the moment, he simply _is_.

At the sound of the bedroom door, Romana tips her head sideways, away from Leela’s mouth. Undeterred, she licks Romana’s neck, nuzzling the other woman with clear intent.

“Sleepyhead has decided to join us,” Romana says, with the energy of someone at least two cups of tea into her day. “I was beginning to think he’d miss this morning’s briefing, he was dead to the universe.”

Leela spins around with a grin, revealing just how transparent her slip is. The gauzy fabric makes no pretense at modesty; Narvin can’t imagine any Time Lords coming up with a piece of clothing this provocative, which means that the alien woman currently loping across the room toward him is wearing an alien negligee. His face is suddenly ablaze, his fingertips numb. In a gesture of respect, vainly trying to preserve her privacy, he backs up a step and averts his eyes from her jiggling … _everything_.

As if it’s the most natural gesture in the world, Leela seizes hold of his cheeks and pulls him down for a kiss. He’s far too shocked to protest. He hasn’t even sorted out if he _wants_ to protest, as he’s overwhelmed with a tidal wave of sensory information. Her hands and mouth are warm, her tongue between his lips with the same confident familiarity she exhibited palming Romana’s breasts a second ago. It’s as if she has every right to touch him this way, as if this isn’t the most novel and planet-shattering moment of his lives. She tastes incredible, like rose-haw, and cerub tea, and some other flavor – her own, or Romana’s, or a combination of the two. He continues to retreat without realizing it, Leela along for the ride, until his back thumps the wall.

She hums a laugh against his mouth and lets go. Gazing at him as if he has just finished hanging both suns in the sky, she says, “Romana, do not tease him for resting so long. He worked very hard last night, I am certain he needed the sleep.”

It finally occurs to him that the short CIA robes in his closet belong to Romana. The disheveled bed belongs to all three of them. This should have dawned on him earlier, but his critical analysis skills have taken a backseat to his utter bewilderment. He should say so many things: _this is an accident, he doesn’t remember how he stumbled into this flat or this kiss or this threesome, and perhaps they have mistaken him for someone else?_ It isn’t that he doesn’t want to be here; the fact that his circulatory system keeps trying to route blood to inconvenient places is a testament to how pleasant he finds this improbable scenario.

His desire and disorientation are dizzying, and he stands mute as Leela clings to him.

_Which Leela?_ The thought is too much, too complex, he can’t grasp it properly.

“Worked hard, did he?” Romana sniffs, turning back to pour a drop of cream into the tea. “I seem to remember him finishing before I gave him permission. It wasn’t hard for _that_ long.”

“Even if he did not have permission, three spans is an honorable length of time. Especially with the merciless teasing we put him through,” Leela replies, winking at him conspiratorially. She seizes his hand and tows him toward the kitchen. “Have you forgotten that today is Narvin’s turn to give us orders? You would do well to be kind, so he does not develop a taste for revenge. Could you hold out for three spans, Romana?”

“Hmm.” Sighing, Romana brings a hot mug and deposits it in his hands, her fingers folding around his. “Tea, Deputy Coordinator?”

“Romana wishes to bribe you into forgiving her rudeness,” Leela says, embracing Romana from behind, nudging her forward. The tea is trapped between them, steaming against his breastbone, with Romana’s fingers twined with his around the cup. Leela plants a kiss against her ear, and slips her arms past Romana’s waist, catching his hips and pulling him in, so the three of them jostle together. He tries, and fails, to remember his own name. “What say you, Narvin? Will you fall for such an obvious ploy? Or have you already devised suitable punishment for what we put you through last night?”

_Which Leela?_

The two women stare up at him, expectant. Romana lifts an eyebrow, her pupils enormous, her desire subtle but clear. It’s a gorgeous counterpoint to the unabashed hunger in Leela’s gaze, with her pink cheeks and swollen lips, wet from kissing. This moment isn’t one of raging lust, at least not yet. It’s domestic intimacy, as gentle as the morning suns-light streaming through the nearby window. Leela and Romana are behaving as if casual flirtation and lovemaking at daybreak is a commonplace state of affairs between the three of them, before they go to work together protecting Gallifrey.

Standing in front of them he feels _seen_, for the first time in his life, as if he’s a book spread open on a table, from the darkest chapters to the most boring, unremarkable parts of himself. Their unvarnished affection makes it clear that these two women have read him cover to cover, and not a single sordid word has diminished their opinion of him. He is known, and wanted, and thoroughly laid claim to.

In response to this revelation, Narvin’s panic is instant and ungovernable. It hits him like a volt-lash, crackling through his fog of confusion and giving him a single survival directive: _Run._

“The office!” he blurts loudly, leaping back and out of reach. The tea falls to the floor, mug bouncing and hot liquid spraying across the tile. Leela moves with her usual agility, dodging and hauling Romana along. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to – that is, I’m not feeling quite – not quite myself. I should go to the office.”

“Darling?” Romana says in concern. She leans down to shake tea droplets from the hem of her silk robe, gazing up at him through her eyelashes.

Leela steps forward, her forehead wrinkled in concern. “Husband, are you unwell?”

He’ll burst into a thousand shards if he makes eye contact. He’ll fly apart like a pile of cinders if another term of endearment is aimed at him. He turns and dashes out the front door; he reaches the lobby of the CIA Tower before he realizes he’s still barefoot.

_Husband. Darling._

And then staccato, like a computer ticking away at an algorithm:_ Which Leela?_

Grappling with a wave of nausea when he barges into his office suite, he hardly notices the assistant who hops to his feet in surprise. “Deputy Coordinator, you’re in early!”

“I have things to take care of,” he replies, swallowing bile.

“But sir, there isn’t anything on the calendar for another span,” he says, gesturing at the agenda projected above his desk.

“Stuff the calendar! This is urgent. Cancel everything this morning. I’m not to be disturbed for any reason.” He takes a step, pauses to add, “That goes double for Coordinator Romana and Agent Leela. Not even if they threaten your job or your life, respectively, no one is to be admitted. I don’t care if Omega himself walks in that door and demands a meeting, turn him away. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the assistant replies, eyes wide. Narvin realizes he probably looks a bit mad, with his bare feet and haggard expression. Squaring his shoulders, scraping together something of a professional aura, he steps into his office. 

After he locks the door, his first order of business is to find a reflective surface. Regeneration seems unlikely, given the fact that he hasn’t any left, but it would be the most obvious explanation for his miraculously healed injuries, and delayed post-regenerative trauma could explain his missing memories. There are no mirrors in his office – he isn’t Braxiatel, after all – but at a certain angle with the lights turned up, he catches sight of himself reflected in the window.

He is his old self, short hair and blue eyes and beard. He takes a strange comfort in this revelation, even as it leaves other questions unanswered.

The rest of his office is also blessedly familiar and unremarkable, his login codes unchanged, his favorite data pad still scratched across the top right-hand corner. Collapsing into his chair, he rests his shaking hands on the desk and closes his eyes, focusing his attention inward on his biological processes, bringing himself under control. His limbic system is the most difficult, his concentration cracking periodically as the words _husband_ and _darling_ spontaneously intrude into his thoughts, but eventually he manages.

Calm and collected, he begins his research, starting with his own personnel file. He and a lone Leela arrived home safely four months ago, not in a Cylethian Skipjack, but via a Tarlean freighter that found the two of them drifting in an escape pod twenty-five clicks from the space station where they were originally abducted.

_Which Leela?_

What happened to the Cylethian Skipjack? Where did they find an escape pod? Most importantly, where is the second Leela? Page after page of sterile, professional mission notes, all of them clearly composed by his own hand, with no mention of an extra Leela or answers for his questions. When the two of them returned to Gallifrey, they immediately went back to work. There’s no note of a marriage in his file, or in Romana and Leela’s very unremarkable dossiers. But a marriage to one or both of them is just the sort of thing they’d have all agreed to keep off the public record. Things are safer that way, personally and politically, when you’re running an agency like the CIA.

How in Omega's bloody name did he manage to fall into a relationship with Leela and Romana in the space of four months? What other rankly unprofessional behavior is he indulging in? He scours mission reports and agency updates from his missing months, but none of the information triggers any memories. He reads for so long, hardly blinking so he doesn’t miss any details, his eyeballs feel like someone has rolled them in sand and popped them back into their sockets.

It’s as if he’s been sleepwalking, or skipping through time, or – he doesn’t know what. If the files aren’t doctored, if they’re telling the truth, then there must be something wrong with him.

He drags his hands across his face, scrubbing his fingernails through his hair as if he can dig out the missing information, and then buzzes his assistant. The comm crackles. “Yes, sir?”

“Summon Staff Surgeon Postrell to my office immediately. Tell her it’s urgent, ask her to bring a medi-kit.”

“Yes, sir.”

The CIA’s chief surgical officer appears within five microspans. In the anteroom, Narvin’s assistant peers out from behind her, obviously concerned.

“Good afternoon, Coordinator. Your assistant said it was an emergency?”

“You may enter, Lady Postrell,” he says, waving her in. “Thank you for coming.” He closes the door in his assistant’s face and locks it again.

“How can I help you? Our meeting isn’t until day after tomorrow, so I haven’t got the latest batch of recruit physicals up for review, if that’s –”

“No, that’s not it.” Narvin stands. “I’ve been putting you off, when it comes to my own physical.” Not that he has any memory of putting her off this time, in particular, but Narvin has never willingly submitted to Agency physicals. For several hundred years he was forced to, as a requirement for keeping his job. As soon as he became Coordinator, he made himself exempt, and hasn’t had one in ages. Here and now, in his office, he lifts his chin at the doctor. “I’d like you to conduct one now.”

Postrell blinks. “Now?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Of course, Deputy Coordinator.” She steps over to the conference table, off to one side of his large office, and begins pulling various scanning devices from her medi-kit. “Over here, if you please?”

She’s quick and efficient, with minimal chatter, as she does her evaluation. Mental and physical, every aspect of him is surveyed and catalogued. At the end, she scans the results file on her medi-pad, flicking through various charts and making noises of approval.

“Everything’s normal?”

“Remarkably so. This regeneration is slightly … how to put this? … long in the tooth, and shows a few signs of wear and tear, but less than I’d expect. I recommend programming more vitamins in your replimat settings, but aside from that, you’re fit as a flutterwing fresh out of its cocoon.”

“And my cognitive function?”

“Fine,” she replies, shooting him a glance over the top of the medi-pad. “Do you have any specific concerns?”

He trusts Postrell as much as he trusts anyone else at the CIA, but admitting he has a gaping hole in his memory would give her grounds to relieve him of duty – and that would only be the start. “No. Thank you for your time.”

Postrell pauses, instruments half-loaded into her medi-kit, and says, “You’re sure, Deputy Coordinator? The ordeal you and Agent Leela went through during the Lovidian mission was difficult, and neither of you have left Gallifrey since. Is there something related to –”

“No,” he repeats emphatically. “That will be all.”

With a shrug, she finishes packing her things and leaves. Narvin does bury his face in his hands then, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms and letting out a frustrated noise.

He’s fairly certain that vitamin deficiency doesn’t cause selective amnesia.

He has to tell someone. Normally he’d go to Leela first: she isn’t in his direct chain of command, he can approach her for help without risking professional fallout. But which Leela is she? What happened between the three of them on that Skipjack? Is she the reason his memory is like this? Approaching Romana is an entirely different proposition: she’s his friend, of course, but also his commander. The professional threads between them are thick, making this sort of personal discussion all the more difficult. But she wasn’t on that space station and is less likely to be tainted by whatever this is.

How does he even begin to factor in the fact that, in some way or another, the three of them are _married_, and shouldn’t he trust his wives?

He’s just begun to calculate how long he can feasibly hide here in his office when his assistant buzzes the intercom.

“I told you, I’m not to be disturbed.”

“Sir, it’s a rholite-class message from the Phaidonian intelligence service, with platinum alpha encryption,” his assistant replies. “Directed to you, specifically.”

“Oh?” Maybe he's been going about today all wrong. Maybe he needs a distraction. Returning to his desk, he activates the holographic screen on the biggest wall. “Send it through.”

A Phaidonian appears as the image flickers to life, wearing the body of a Killoran thrall. Narvin knows this agent; the two of them spent a month on a joint mission during Narvin's days as a junior agent, long before he was promoted to Coordinator and Romana was President. They were the one who initially shared information about the strange happenings at Lovidian Station Four on the Phaidonian frontier and asked for his help finding half a dozen of their missing intelligence officers.

“Narvin, we’ve lost ten more agents,” they say, black eyes glittering as they glance to the side of the video feed, as if watching for eavesdroppers. The tips of their ears twitch nervously. “My government is too proud to reach out, but I’m not. The disappearances are accelerating, moving closer to our home system. We're beginning to pick up time anomalies with each disappearance, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Our scientists are baffled.”

Narvin is on his feet, walking closer to the screen without realizing it, as if he might peer through the photons and find some secret hidden beyond them, an answer about what happened on Lovidian Station Four.

The Phaidonian's nose wiggles as they concentrate, straining to keep their composure. "One professional to another, this is bad. Very bad. You and that other agent weren't enough, last time. We're going to need more people, and more resources." 

Narvin knows, without a flutter of doubt, that he's going to take this message to Romana and convince her to send a full squad of agents to confront this creeping threat. He’s going to lead them personally, and when he gets there, he’s going to reach into one of those time anomalies and pull out the truth, even if he has to do it with his bare hands.

The instant he makes this decision, his time sense clicks into a crooked shape, like the wrong numbers have been entered into a cosmic lock and the safe door has jammed shut. He promptly bends over and empties the contents of his stomach, then keels onto the floor in a fetal position, wracked with cramps from head to toe.

He falls into blackness.

* * *

_-No, wrong. Snap the thread.  
_

_-This one is too weak, its physical vessel is too damaged. We're burning it up too fast. Three more tries, and it will be spent. We'll have to find another, after that._

_-I told you, I won't need another. I can do it with just this one. Now bring up the next thread, and try again._


End file.
